"....everyone born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith. Who then overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God." 1 John 5:3-5

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The Mormonism Research Ministry is a missionary/apologetics organization organized in 1979 to propagate the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to critically evaluate the differences between Mormonism and biblical Christianity. Of the many crucial differences, the Mormon rejection of the Genesis account of supernatural creation ex nihilo in favor of a naturalistic account is perhaps the most glaring example. MRM reveals that Joseph Smith taught that matter is eternal and the Mormon God Elohim had no power to create out of nothing. Elohim merely reorganized already present elements, which have no beginning or end and cannot be destroyed. (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pp. 350-352):

“Since Mormons believe that the elements are eternal, it follows that they deny the ex nihilo creation.” (Encyclopedia of Mormonism 1:400).

In this vein, the great Mormon prophet Joseph Smith explains how their God came to be God:

"It is necessary we should understand the character and being of God and how he came to be so; for I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and suppose that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see. and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did… Here then, is eternal life--to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priest to God, the same as all Gods have done before you, namely by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one. . . . (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 345-47)

The Mormon God is a creature from within creation (nature). In fact, Mormon scripture states that he is merely a physical, exalted man who lives on a planet near the great star Kolob where he and his wives busily procreate millions of spirit children who are sent into this material realm of suffering and evil to live according to the laws of the gospel and thereby earn their own godhood over their own planet:

"The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us." (D&C 310:22, Ed Decker, "The Lesser gods of Mormonism")

In the Genesis account the living, supernatural Triune God created all things "ex-nihilo," or out of nothing. He is self-existent, eternal, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. He is the sovereign Lord of the universe. He is the God of all creation. He is the God who stands outside of the space-time dimension. This means that creation actually began before time came to be as God spoke life, soul/spirit, matter and all else out of nothing. The living, supernatual God is the First Cause of all things. (Psalm 33:6; John 1:3; Romans 4:17; Hebrews 11:3):

"For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." Col. 1:16,17

In the "Pagan Temptation," Christian scholar Thomas Molnar writes that the idea that matter is eternal is a pattern of thought stretching back to the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks in the West and in the East to the Upanishads:

"Matter is regarded as the opposite of God, equal to him or even greater in power, and thus absolutely evil. All of the great philosophers of Greece believed this....with the exception of Aristotle (and the materialists, of course.)" (P. 26)

In this way of thinking, everything somehow emerged out of either eternally existing matter as the ancients and Joseph Smith taught, or in contemporary terms from out of spontaneously-generated matter. From the Babylonians forward primordial matter has gone by many names. For example: divine One Substance, watery abyss, chaos, or void.

The Egyptian Sun-God Ra emerged (created himself) from out of Nu---the divine void or One Substance (primordial matter) and then as Joseph Smith recounts, became God "by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one:"

"I came into being from primordial matter...I made all the forms under which I appeared by means of (or out of) the god-soul which I raised up out of Nu (i.e., the primeval abyss of water.) (The Long War Against God, Dr. Henry Morris, p. 243)

In all pagan systems that speak of pre-existent matter as "spirit," Molnar writes that spirit is not personal. It does not live, think or speak; it merely is. The human soul therefore is not created in the spiritual image of the living God Who exists outside of the time-space dimension (nature) Who Spoke and revealed Himself to man, thus it must be said that,

"Thought, reflection, and discursive reason entered the world through humanity..." (p. 30)

This is naturalism or materialism, which is the belief--taught by Joseph Smith---that there is neither living supernatural God nor heavenly realm outside of the space-time dimension. There is only the natural dimension and in modern "scientific" terms, the idea that brute matter spontaneously generated itself from nothing (void) is called abiogenesis.

Materialism is held in common by pantheism and spiritualism and dates back to pagan antiquity and was or is taught by all non-Biblical, non-Genesis account (creation ex nihilo) thought systems.

The unresolvable problem for all of these systems, and this includes Mormonism, is the ultimate origin of life and soul/spirit. This is why contemporary naturalists such as SETI researcher Paul Davies and Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA molecule, have rejected abiogenesis in favor of panspermia.

Panspermia is the idea that life on earth was accidentally seeded by meteorites containing the essential building blocks of life or perhaps by highly evolved extraterrestrials from deep space who for billions of years have been guiding the evolution of man. The extraterrestrial idea was favored by Arthur C. Clarke in his book, "Childhood's End" and a variation on this theme has recently been advanced by Davies, Crick, and Ralph Pudritz of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Crick however admits that panspermia only pushes the unresolvable problem of the origin of life out into deep space:

"This scenario still leaves open the question of who designed the designer [aliens] — how did life originally originate?" (Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, 1981)

The revolutionary impact of the Christian teaching about the Incarnation was nothing less than a scandal for pagan sages just as it is for modern materialists (i.e., Karl Marx, Freud), pantheist idealists such as Hegel and Luciferian Theosophists, as well as for both pre-Christian and Christian-era Gnostic's and Mormon prophet Joseph Smith:

"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1:14

Molnar writes that it is inconceivable to nature sages that God,

"...the spiritual being par excellence, should assume materiality---a thought as distasteful to their contemporaries as the idea of creation ex nihilo, which meant that matter too was God's creation and did not preexist creation as a separate and evil principle." (pp. 26-27)

In company with pagan sages, Mormonism rejects the historical Jesus of Christianity, meaning they reject the Incarnation. While Christians adhere to the fact that Christ's birth was the result of a miraculous conception, that Mary was a virgin yet still conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:18), according to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism (4:1676),

"Jesus Christ is not the Father of the spirits who have taken or yet shall take bodies upon this earth, for He is one of them. He is The Son, as they are sons and daughters of Elohim."

Gospel Principles, an LDS Church manual (2009, p. 9), states,

"All men and women are literally sons and daughters of Deity."

This includes the Mormon Jesus, who according to Sixth LDS President Joseph F. Smith was,

"Among the spirit children of Elohim, the first-born was and is Jehovah, or Jesus Christ, to whom all others are juniors" (Gospel Doctrine, p.70).

So both Jesus (Jehovah) and his spirit-brother Lucifer were birthed by the human-god Elohim who lives near the great star Kolob with his many goddess-wives. Twelfth President Spencer W. Kimball comments,

"Long before you were born a program was developed by your creators ... The principal personalities in this great drama were a Father Elohim, perfect in wisdom, judgment, and person, and two sons, Lucifer and Jehovah." (Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, pp. 32-33; source: Mormonism Research Ministry).

Putting all of this together, the Mormon man-god Elohim emerged (self-created) out of the primordial abyss (eternally existing matter) much like the ancient Egyptian's self-created Sun-God Ra. And as with all ancient nature origin accounts, the Mormon man-god cannot account for either the ultimate origin of life or man's soul/spirit:

"The essence of the human is not the body, but the soul. It is the soul alone that God made in his own image and the soul that he loves....For the sake of the soul...the Son of God came into the world...." (Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 25, Ancient Christian Devotional, Oden and Crosby, p. 153)

Nor can it ultimately account for the two created sexes, male and female since all things--including the Mormon man-god Elohim-- somehow emerged out of genderless spirit (pre-existing matter). Thus like their ancient counterparts, Mormonism is fated to give way before the demands of gender-neutral homosexualism. Capitulation is already in process:

"Attorneys for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are in quiet discussions with leaders of Utah’s gay and lesbian community, trying to hammer out language for a statewide ban on housing and employment discrimination that the church could support. Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, opened a bill file on Thursday — the last day to request attorneys draft legislation — titled Housing and Employment Amendments and will sponsor the legislation should an agreement be reached." (Mormon Church Working on Bill to Protect Gays From Discrimination, hypervocal.com)

By whatever label, homosexuality, gay, transgender or bi-sexuality, androgyny and paganism go together like a hand and glove. Prior to Jesus Christ's earthly ministry pagan sages generally taught and practiced some form of gender-neutrality (androgyny) in keeping with their belief that pre-existent matter is the "one substance" out of which all things originated. But when Jesus Christ, fully man, fully God walked this earth, sages were faced with the distasteful truth that God really did create just two sexes, male and female.

Knowing the truth they chosen the lie instead, as Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, makes clear in Romans 1:25-27:

"They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."

In conclusion, by rejecting the supernatural Triune God, Mormonism cannot account for either the origin of life or of man's soul/spirit (Psalm 115:4-8). And by rejecting the historical Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, Mormonism cannot logically account for the two sexes, fating it to eventually give way to homosexualism in its' every permutation...the crimes against nature said Augustine, which are the,

"....crimes of the men of Sodom (and if) all nations in the world committed them they would all stand guilty of the same crime against the Law of God, which did not design men so that they should use each other this way." (Confessions of St. Augustine, p. 49)